A New York Story: My Subway Valentine

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Of late, we're getting horrible news from the New York City subway: women getting pushed onto the tracks, with the expected, appalling results.(Lesson: never stand on the edge of the platform while waiting for a train.)The New York City subway must've been part of the punishment God had in mind when He condemned humanity to work for a living. Morning commutes are nightmares of biblical proportions. Every day, you fight your way onto crowded trains (or risk being late for work) while simultaneously dodging potential gropers. If you're a woman, you quickly learn to identify the types of male commuters most inclined to try and cop a feel (the ethnic-looking ones--of ANY ethnicity-- are good bets). Some of these guys even turn it into a sport, riding the train lines in loops, scouting for potential victims. Usually a target for such affronts, it never occurred to me that I could turn the tables and do something similar to a man on a train. But I have,I did, and if it bothered him, he didn't let on. It happened pre-pandemic, a couple of years ago. I was making my way home, after a bad day at work and a nasty encounter with a groper. He had rubbed his groin against my backside and flashed a ferocious grin when I turned around to see what I was dealing with. He looked like a homeless Buckwheat on steroids (or heroin, more likely). Homeless men are the ones attacking women on subways these days, BTW. NYPD take notice. But back to my story: not wanting to cause a commotion or gratify the creep with any shows of anger, I just edged away from him. But I had moved in front of a door, where there was nothing to grab onto for balance. And the train was packed. Directly behind me, holding on to a ceiling bar, was an Irish-looking old man, with the requisite tweed jacket, wool beret, and clear blue eyes. Almost without thinking, I did the unthinkable: I leaned sideways against the old man's chest. I don't know what possessed me, you must believe me when I tell you that I don't go around throwing myself at strange men in public transportation.

But as the old song goes, we all need somebody to lean on, and the tolerance of this stranger was the only thing keeping me upright on that train. The funny thing was, we didn't acknowledge each other during the entirety of that odd little moment in time.We pretended it wasn't happening. Another man might have grinned or pushed me away or tried to pick me up or touch me inappropriately, but this one did none of these things. Instead, he chose to be a gentleman, squaring his jaw and staring ahead with those steely blue eyes, while intermittently tensing and bracing himself to support my weight with every bump and jostle.(Mind you, I'm not exactly light).Was he pissed? I'll never know. I got off that train in a hurry, without saying goodbye. Or thanking him. But wherever he is, whoever he might be,I'll light a candle for him every Valentine's Day until the day I die. (Full disclosure: the gentleman in the above photo is not my savior of

the train,just someone who looks extraordinarily like him)

For Xmas: A Trojan Horse named Joe

These days, about the best thing I can say for current US President Joe Biden is that he's not former US President Donald Trump.

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Requiem for a Brother

Despite my most desperate prayers,my brother Alfredo passed away recently in Atlanta, Georgia, of natural causes. He'd been

born in Havana, Cuba, on a November 26. He was only two years older than I--perhaps for the first time ever, I was staring mortality right in the face. I could feel its breath, I'd wake up to its presence. How could this be happening? During almost 3 months, my brother had been hanging on to life, going in and out of rehab centers and hospitals in Atlanta. For me, each day became an emotional roller coaster ride, as he showed signs of doing better or getting worse. I'd cling on to any excuse for hope, but it was tough to come by. The hospitals in Atlanta allowed no visits because of Covid. Every evening for almost 3 months, I'd call to hear doctors and nurses drone on about this or that, and suddenly it horrified me to realize what they were saying: that they were doing everything they could, but my brother was dying. His systems were shutting down and toppling one by one, like a house of cards. It was soul-wrenching to stand by as he drifted away, to see him onscreen briefly in one last virtual visit, to hear his last, barely conscious stammers over the phone,then, one night later, receive pained condolences from the hospital staff. At our age, Alfredo could have lived several more years, but he never stopped smoking and he had a bad heart (that he chose to ignore). In the end, it just gave out. I thank the fates that Alfredo enjoyed a rich and varied sojourn on this earth. He had a PhD in languages. He worked for nearly a decade at CNN in Spanish as a producer and on-air talent, then went on to a busy and diverse career as an independent Spanish-language broadcaster. He also spoke Russian fluently and interpreted for former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young on city trade missions to Russia. His personal existence was at least as meaningful. Many now call to tell me how much they miss him and how in their hearts, they're honoring the memory of this kind, joyful, generous and outgoing man. Alfredo liked to entertain and bring people together on special occasions, or gather with them at the various Atlanta restaurants he favored. His dry intellectual wit engaged and delighted his friends. Although he never had children,he touched many lives, serving as moral support and inspiration to those who needed it, leading groups of young Cuban exiles who sought to explore their roots in Cuba, educating me, his sister, in the literature of our native culture, even serving as a surrogate father to the progeny of a deeply troubled single mother he'd befriended. I'd often hear him complain about her with loving exasperation--and I understood that he'd come to view her as another sibling. They both lived in Atlanta and I was way up in New York, so it heartened me that he had found a second sister in this woman, who was also a writer and about my age. Over the years,he helped mentor and raise her two girls to successful,independent adulthood as cinematographers, and today they consider themselves his beloved god daughters. But perhaps the most important life he touched was that of his lifelong partner, Jose "Riqui" Alonso, the love of his life for over 50 years. Riqui, a school friend of mine, met Alfredo at my parent's home in Miami, while visiting me. Both men were in their early 20's and never separated from that date until the present. They were officially married in 2014, in another Deep South State where gay marriage was sanctioned at the time. Sadly, their last few years together brought a measure of estrangement. It happens. They'd each suffered heart attacks and become partially disabled, their routines turned considerably harder, tinged with bitterness and recriminations. Today, their story comes full circle: the widower plans to go back to Florida and spend his remaining years closer to his own relatives. The little house in the woodsy neighborhood of Northeast Atlanta, the one they inhabited for over 40 years will no doubt be sold,

its many memories folded, packed and removed to make room for new lives and hopes and tears. So it goes. Alfredo is survived by me,by a younger brother, and by my son, who is also his godson and bears his uncle's proud name.

No-kill shelter

Two days ago, our beloved cat Shadow started stumbling around in circles, head turned to one side. We spent a small fortune on the vet only to be told we'd have to spend thousands more to learn what's "really" wrong with him. Finding out would cost an additional $5,000. Alas, the poor creature had become inconvenient and I, selfish wretch that I am, considered putting him down-- but my son won't hear of it. "You wouldn't do that to a relative,would you?", he asked. So we're nursing the animal, medicating him, hand-feeding him, and changing his pads when he soils them. We try to give him physical therapy. We've become a regular no-kill animal shelter.At 16,he's a brave little soul, obviously fighting for his life. He's alert, he eats, seems to have a fair amount of strength, and is slowly regaining his sense of balance and direction. We're hoping for the best, but he's not our only problem. These days,I'm dealing with the same kind of end-of-life scenarios I went through with my parents 20 years ago, and my grandparents before that. Only now it's my own generation's turn to get sick and die, and I'm just hoping I'll live long enough to help out contemporaries in dire need. A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from a hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. My older brother had suffered a stroke, and they were searching for his relatives. He is suffering from dementia and we still don't know whether he'll be able to return home or have to go into long-term care. His next of kin is his husband, who himself had suffered a stroke a few years ago and can barely communicate. My brother had been his caretaker, now both men are adrift, incapacitated. Now I have two brothers to worry about. It saddens me to remember what full and happy lives they've led, and I have to wonder what God would want them reduced to their present state.My younger brother, my son and I flew down to Atlanta to see how we could help. Atlanta, which I hadn't visited in decades, turned out to be an unpleasant surprise, a third world shithole of a city with ugly corporate architecture, kamikaze drivers and the smell of menthol cigarrettes everywhere. There are vagrants all over the place, they live in tents on median strips within major highways. Nothing works as it should. Nobody comes to the phone, returns calls or gives out information--not even direct numbers.They make you go through switchboards that invariably put you on hold. The ubiquitous recordings tell you to leave a message and expect a callback in 3 o 4 days.Maybe. (It's not a "Southern" thing, either. We're also dealing with Miami on an estate issue, and everyone there seems to be on their game.We ordered some legal documents from North Carolina, and actually got them within a few short days.)

Once in Atlanta, in a darkened little house, we sifted through the wreckage of lives that had been descending into squalor for years,without our realizing it (we had all been estranged when we had to regroup as a family and rush to the rescue). I think that things started falling apart when both men began to have health problems. Now there was filth, clutter, unpaid bills

and overgrown weeds everywhere. Their poor dog had a skin infection and was not being walked, so she had defecated throughout the house.I tried turning the dog over to Animal Rescue, but my brother in law refused to give her up, and in Georgia,go figure, you can't rescue abused animals without permission from the abuser (whereas in New York, abused animals can take their abusers to court).We cleaned up,took the dog to the vet, and are now looking into legal and financial issues.Almost miraculously, a squad of Good Samaritans has emerged to help us out. We're daily in touch with a group of well-meaning friends and neighbors who take turns checking up on my brother in law and the dog. The dog's still not being walked, but she's let out in the evenings and makes her bathroom run of the neighborhood before returning home. Nobody interferes with her. Some of these neighbors didn't even know my brother and his husband before all of this happened. Meanwhile, my brother languishes in rehab, cut off from external contact by Covid precautions within the facility. We check in by phone every day; he appears to be getting better. We're hoping he'll be able to return home. I've decided that now that I'm retired, I can dedicate myself to look out for my brother.I have the time, and it's needed.

Amazingly, I seem to have taken my brother's place with his friends, who speak to me as though they've known me my entire life. It's very moving, I find comfort in their voices and I am perfectly at ease with them, as though they were my old friends, too. All throughout the ordeal, I only cry whenever I speak to my brother and realize he's having a bad day. This is new. I'm ashamed to confess that in my life,I have shed more tears for cats I have lost, than for estranged relatives, including my own mother. Maybe now I'm being given the chance to atone for my intransigence of the past. Maybe this whole episode, with its wonderful cast of characters, has restored my faith in humanity.

Organic Hispanics

(Art by Stacey Torres, Etsy.com) Well, here we are, and it's Hipanic Heritage Month again. Time for ethnic dance troupes to put on their garish costumes and go hopping around in public, while spectators snicker under their breath. Time for Professional Hispanics, non-profit types who profit from government funding as self- proclaimed community leaders, to come out and promote themselves on local news shows. Time to be reminded of Hispanic role models who raise the bar so impossibly high for the rest of us, they might as well not exist. (Sonia Sotomayor? Really?). To me, Hispanic Heritage Month is about underscoring US Latinos' status as Other. People who whites are comfortable with as long as they can laugh at us, our accent or our appearance. As long as they can remind us that we are different. And they will, often. You can be light-skinned, educated and accentless, and some white

person will always greet you with a hearty "HO-LA, A-MI-GA"! Being categorized as "other" means you're not really equal, that you're not allowed to compete on an even footing with people whose gifts you may exceed. It reduces the arena to work related to your ethnicity, so you end up trying to out-Hispanic each other for crumbs off the mainstream table. And then there's capitalism, the drive to turn Latinos into commodities that form a huge consumer market within the US. So there are powerful forces at work keeping US Latinos as "other". Worse,too many Latinos buy into the stereotype. I've found that in New York, if you're not short, dark and manifestly ignorant, other Hispanics look at you askance -- never mind that you can curse in Spanish and shake your ass with the best/worst of them (while also knowing about your literature and history and speaking and writing the language correctly because you didn't learn it second-hand in some ghetto). It's a reverse discrimination of sorts. But we're not all bookies and churro ladies, so deal with it. Somewhere between Carmen Miranda and Cameron Diaz,there are millions of people like me: educated, integrated Hispanics who grew up in the US., who retain their ethnic identity but feel no neeed to flaunt it. They are a "market", too, why won't anyone here see it? While there are plenty of black and brown pundits on English language news TV, I notice a dearth of Latino spokesmen. That's because Latino viewers are supposed to be watching Univision and Telemundo, right? WRONG! Many of us find it boring, embarrassing and, yes, primitive--largely produced in countries that are foreign to us.

That's why I was overjoyed to see Jose Diaz-Balart get his own show on MSNBC this month. Jose, a second generation Cuban exile, is exactly what I'm talking about. He speaks with a trace of an accent. He wears his ethnicity lightly, like a second skin. He comes off as refined, professional. Unlike Black pundits, who take every chance to trumpet their Blackness to guests and viewers, as if it were not obvious, Jose is never heavy-handed in his projection. He treats his Latino guests with understated familiarity,like they're all members of the same, exquisite, secret society. Every now and then, he'll drop in a quick Spanish phrase to underscore this. His presence gives me hope that finally,someone is bothering to go beyond stereotypes in order to appeal to a segment of the public that's been ignored for way too long. Felicidades, Jose.

No symbols, no problem?

When we first moved to Miami from Havana, I was enrolled in Catholic school and my two brothers went to public. For us kids, integration to the zeitgeist came easily; there were few Cubans in Miami back then--not enough to be targeted for prejudice. Granted, it wasn't all smooth sailing. I spoke near perfect English, but was still viewed as different--weird--by my classmates and even teachers. (Mrs. Mongelia disliked me for no discernible reason).And a few days ago, my brother Jorge told me a childhood story I'd never heard before. As adults, we three siblings have scattered along the Eastern Seaboard, and,as too often happens in the US, we're reunited only by family tragedies. It is on these occasions that reminiscences emerge from the vault of time, and sometimes, you're surprised by what people closest to you hide deep in the recesses of memory. Miami in the 60's was still very much segregated. Signs designating drinking fountains as "white" and "colored" could be found in schools. My brother remembers an open discussion between two of his teachers about which drinking fountain he should use. Is a Cuban white or colored? "Look at him... Just ... LOOK at him!", one teacher kept yelling, without specifying what should be looked at. My brother felt confused; he'd never had to consider his racial identity before. The truth is that Cubans come in all colors, from pink, to yellow, to black, but mostly in varying shades of tan. Moreover, the Cuban take on race is quite simple: you are what the mirror dictates. If you look white, that's what you are. And if your fraternal twin sister happens to look black, well, she's black. And you're still white. There's no arguing with optics; no wrestling with one-drop rules. My brother was one of only two Cubans in that school at that moment.Much to their credit, school administrators did the right thing,perhaps figuring, correctly, that more of these nondescript, olive-skinned creatures might soon arrive to further confound their notions of race. They removed the signs from the drinking fountains.Problem solved. Oh, if only everything was that easy... Recently, a gigantic statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was hoisted off its pedestal in downtown Richmond, Va. where it had been since 1890. This was greeted with much fanfare; removal of Confederate symbols all over the South has become a way to make white Southerners face the truth of their violent racial past and all the pain they inflicted n others, to strip away their cover story of the Civil War as a lost but noble cause. Nurturing illusions of past greatness was how Southerners consoled themselves in defeat and how the rest of the country finessed them back into the fold. For over 100 years, the memory of soldiers on both sides was honored,the Civil War remembered as a generic catastrophe that affected the whole nation---much like World War I--instead of an act of treachery by one segment of the population.Growing up in the South, this is how I assimilated history, but now it seems the time for finessing is over and the brass knuckles are out. And while I understand the downpour of long-supressed rage from those who've had to suffer the glorification of slavery for so many years,it still shocks me to hear war veterans described as "traitors". They were products of their time and place,they thought they were doing right-- most didn't even own slaves. You could say they didn't know any better, though their descendants arguably should. But should we now ask these people to remove from their walls all those yellowed photos of ancestors in Confederate garb? That's a part of their history, and you can't erase it--you can only try to cast shame on it through public acts. Unfortunately, ripping Confederate statues off pedestals won't yield the same quick beneficial results as removing "white" and "colored" signs off drinking fountains.People can be coerced to immediately say and do what's considered right at the moment, but it always takes longer to truly change hearts and minds.

NY’s Disgraced Gov Cuomo: Let’s Not Pretend He Did Any REAL Good

After being made to resign by official accusations of sexual harrassment,NY Governor Andrew Cuomo is finding nuggets of forgiveness among some prominent Democrats. They claim that, except for,you know, the sex thing, he wasn't all that bad.In fact, he was kinda good. In fact, he did "a helluva job" , to quote President Biden.

The majority (though not all) of these semi-sympathizers are men. Most prominent women won't dignify with any kindness the governor's thuggish,piggish behavior towards his female staff and acquaintances. Even if some of these accusations had been fueled by spite, I believe most are genuine. Otherwise,how could so many ladies have stepped forward at once, telling the same horror story? Still, I can see how Cuomo apologists might believe that the sex thing didn't matter that much in the end. Because in the end,it might have just been the best pretext to pry a cynical despot off his ironclad perch. Notice how the impeachment drive evaporated once Cuomo quit. Now his female enemies claim that he got off too easy; the men are more philosophical: he's gone, no need to crucify him. Getting rid of him has been hard enough. There are no term limits for governors in New York and Cuomo seemed well entrenched. Previous attempts to primary him out the door had failed. Meanwhile, he was doing a lot of harm and very little good. He was reputedly ill-tempered, rude and vindictive, arrogant and vain,more interested in polishing his image than in governing fairly. He neglected state business but worked hard at his public relations, surrounding himself with famous people who sang his praises, staging televised lovefests with admirers, but no reporters to question him. He excelled at grandstanding--empty political gestures to fool constituents into believing something great had been achieved on their behalf. His famous "infrastructure" projects were like facelifts for patients with organ failure. Cuomo built flashy cosmetic additions to the mass transit system, but neglected its real problem: trains and buses running poorly due to severe technical, budget and staffing problems. Cuomo rebuilt the Tappan Zee bridge, then renamed it after his own father and rushed to inaugurate it before addressing its structural safety concerns. His "good" moves were invariably offset by nastiness performed on the sly. His handling of the pandemic was marred by lowballing nursing home deaths, and then illegally using staffers to write a self-congratulatory book. The press reported all of this and yet, the beat went on. Nothing happened. Only NY government workers complained about this man who tried to balance the state budget on their backs by screwing them out of their modest yearly raises,by threatening them with layoffs, by publicly blaming them for the state's financial shortfalls... even though these shortfalls were manufactured by Cuomo himself, who held on tightly to government purse strings while asserting the state was broke. That was his way of flipping the bird at labor unions and dodging contractual agreements with his own employees. But alas,if NY state workers were wise to Cuomo, NY voters were totally blinded by his posturing. New Yorkers LIKED their rugged, swaggering macho governor, who claimed to be "New York Tough". Never mind that he disbanded a state commission tasked with investigating him, that he jealously pushed out a popular, competent head of mass transit,setting adrift a system that had been on the mend,never mind that he refused to work with the progressive mayor of NYC, that he consistently sided with Republican interests although he's a Democrat, that he cut public funding for health and education while refusing to tax his rich friends and that, despite all of this, he had the gall to masquerade as a liberal-- none of it seemed to matter. But the sex thing did. He'd done all kinds of horrid things--did I mention he abandoned his dog at the Governor's Mansion as he was moving out? Or that he dumped his longtime girlfriend after she had a mastectomy? Deplorable acts, but it took a sex scandal to turn public opinion against him. Fine. If that's what it took, so be it; the result was beneficial in the end. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Now on to the next governor--let's see what SHE does...